


Lacuna

by icarus_chained



Series: Phoenix [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Aftermath of captivity, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canonical Character Death, Despair, Determination, Episode Related, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Moving On, Separations, Stubbornness, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 11:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6609343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a warehouse empty of all save two cooling bodies, Earth-2 Martin Stein wakes up inside his own skin for the first time in years, and struggles to come to terms with all that has happened to him and where he's supposed to go from here.</p><p>Fix-it (sort of) for certain aspects of Ep 2x13. I just need this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lacuna

**Author's Note:**

> Warning in advance, in case of confusion with Ray Palmer, E-2 Martin thinks of his Ronnie as 'Raymond'. I wanted something of a reverse of our Firestorm. Martin & Raymond vs Stein & Ronnie. And, um. Deathstorm broke me to pieces, okay?
> 
>  **Cisco:** Ronnie? Is Martin Stein in there?  
>  **Deathstorm!Ronnie:** Oh, I haven’t let him out in years. He doesn’t talk much anymore.

The bodies separated upon death. That was … oddly apropos. Like in those old movies, the classic monster reels, where the werewolf always reverted forms once slain. Not quite a werewolf, in his case. Not quite slain, either. At least not on Martin’s end.

It was … a very vague thought. Not being dead. Something strange and distant, like the body he was suddenly inhabiting once again. It had been such a long time since he’d had a body. Years. It didn’t feel right anymore. He wasn’t sure if that was a psychological effect or because he was likely dying. Again. Dead? He couldn’t … tell. He couldn’t remember how to. He had hoped that death would be quieter, though. He’d hoped …

He’d hoped that it would stop. Consciousness. Awareness. He’d hoped that death would …

It didn’t matter, he supposed. It would happen soon enough. There was little to no mercy in the universe, but entropy at least should still hold sway. The warehouse had fallen still and silent some time ago. He’d rematerialised some distance from the other bodies. He wasn’t entirely sure why. He couldn’t move, though. This body, his body, he didn’t remember how to move it. Exposure, dehydration or starvation should see to him soon enough, assuming that Zoom’s slaughter of Raymond and the Deathstorm gestalt hadn’t already done something slowly fatal. Patience, that was all. He just needed some patience. He’d be able to stop soon enough.

A breeze brushed over him, a change in the air. He felt it, sharp and cold over raw, unfamiliar skin. The sensation was a horror, visceral and intrusive in a way Raymond’s body had never been. The gestalt body had been distant, under Raymond’s command, held at one remove from him. Not far enough, never far enough, he’d still borne witness to far too many things, but it had never pushed at him so sharply and savagely as this. Not in itself. It had been Raymond who’d done that, his mind poking and prodding incessantly once he knew Martin was too cowed to fight back. Making Martin watch. Forcing him to see. The body itself had demanded nothing. It hadn’t belonged to him.

This one did. It was his, it had been … It wanted things, now that it existed enough to be able to again. It was _dying_ , but it wanted things still. It wanted to escape the cold, the deepening ache of it. It wanted to move, to claw itself away from what pained it. It didn’t want to be here. 

Martin didn’t either. The sensations were a new and terrible thing after so many years, but more than that, he simply and desperately didn’t want to be _here_. Not still here. He’d wanted it to stop. Life, awareness. He hoped so long and so desperately for something to make it stop. Even Zoom, even that monster. In that second before death, as Raymond realised they’d been killed, Martin had stirred enough to feel a surge of blind gratitude towards the demon. He hadn’t wanted to. Zoom of all creatures deserved no form of finer feeling. But it had been a way out. It had been a promised ending, after _so many_ years. He’d been grateful for that, blindly and stupidly so.

He shouldn’t still be here. It shouldn’t have happened like this. Not like this. Not trapped inside another body, not helpless and aware and conscious all over again. He should be _dead_. He’d wanted so badly to be dead. Was there some active malice to the universe, for it to pull him free of that safely final gestalt death and drop him here to fade slowly and painfully inside his own skin? Dying as yourself was a _fiction_ , like those old movies, a nice conceit so that the audience could recognise the tragedy of the man beneath the monster one last time. It hardly mattered to him. Aside from possibly that boy from another world, the one who'd known his name and thought to ask after him, there was no one left now to whom his body would mean anything. A clean, final death, that would have been …

He was crying, he realised distantly. He could feel the tears slipping out of the corners of his eyes, trailing across his temples and into his hair. Real tears, wet and warm and bound by gravity to drip their way onto the floor beneath his head. The body’s autonomic reaction to distress. _His_ distress. Not Raymond’s, not anyone else’s. Only his. 

It was too much, far more than he could bear. He tried to curl into himself, to wrap himself into a ball as he had so many times inside Raymond’s head, and this time he had a body attached. This time something connected, an instinct without any need for conscious thought, and the body followed him. It rolled onto its side, onto _his_ side, an aching, staggering motion, and brought its hands up to its face. His hands, cooling but warmer than concrete still. He pressed them into his face, brought his legs up with a scrape to make himself as small as possible. He didn’t remember how to do this. Apparently he didn’t have to. He let the body take command.

People made noises when they were crying. He’d forgotten that. Forgotten the sensation of it. A formless thing, a voice inside someone else’s head, he hadn’t been able to weep for years. Raymond had flown into a rage any time he might have tried, hammered at him mentally and threatened to hammer any number of people physically if he didn’t shut up and keep his snivelling to himself. After Clarissa, he hadn’t even needed the instruction. There’d been no point to grief, after that. No point to anything. He kept himself silent and mute, a passenger waiting for the ride to end. There’d been no point to tears he couldn’t shed.

There was no point to them now, either, but he didn’t seem to have a choice. They spilled out of him, tears and noises, ragged breaths and muffled sobs, and it took so long for them to stop. Hours, years, he couldn’t have said. His body curled in on itself, violent and shaking and still chilled underneath it all, and convulsed itself until all the tears he’d spent years not crying had been wrung free of it, leaving only an aching, exhausted mess. A live one. Still alive, despite everything. The universe had no mercy at all.

He lay there afterwards. His face felt hot, sticky, his hands too. He’d stopped cooling so much. On his side, curled into himself, shaking with the motions of his sobs, it had brought his temperature back up again, and sensation along with it. He could feel … so much. A body, exhausted and spent, waking up after years of absence. A physical, animal thing, still alive and fighting to stay that way, regardless of what the consciousness stored inside it thought to want. It was … it was nearly amusing. Truly, it was almost laughable. There was always some part of him that didn’t know how to quit, wasn’t there? There was always something inside him, something that kept going no matter _how many times_ it had been proven that he shouldn’t want to.

Courage, Clarissa would have called it. Courage or stubbornness, either or. She’d always said she loved it in him, in between the times where she very vociferously claimed she _hated_ it. This thing of his, this thing that wouldn’t back down. That stubborn, obdurate part of him.

He agreed with her now, he thought dazedly. The loving and the hating both. He’d wanted to be dead. He’d needed it, needed it so very desperately. He’d wanted to be with _her_ , if such a thing was possible, and to be nowhere at all if it proved it wasn’t. Heaven or oblivion, were they so very much to ask? But they were. Of course they were. There was no mercy in this world, and there was still a part of him that didn’t understand when it was supposed to back down. Not even years with Raymond had managed to eliminate it, apparently. Not even years a prisoner in someone else’s head. Something in him wanted, even still. Something in him refused to let him be.

Did it matter? He leaned his head against the concrete, taking mildly ironic comfort from the cool of it now. Did it matter what he wanted, what any part of him wanted? He should be dead, and he had no doubts that the universe would catch up to that fact before too long. Mercy was not a feature, and entropy did still rule. Even if he wanted to … to crawl away, to try and remember who he was, to scavenge out some few more hours or days, the universe would catch up to him eventually. Zoom, or someone else, or some internal failure. He’d died, after all. He’d been part of Raymond’s death. God only knew what that had done to their matrix. Instantaneous or drawn out, it was only sensible that that death would kill him somehow eventually. It shouldn’t matter what he wanted now. Anything and everything would only be some small delay of the inevitable.

It was just … that he had something resembling a choice, now. He had a body, he had _his_ body. As useless and possibly dying as it was, it clearly remembered something of how to function. He could … he could do something. Anything. He could crawl to the warehouse door and see what the weather was like before he died. He could crawl over and spit in Raymond’s face. A terrible thing to do to a corpse, to any corpse, but after all these years, after _Clarissa_ , didn’t Raymond deserve it? Didn't his captor deserve at least that much? Didn’t _he_?

He wanted that, he realised. He wanted … something. Not even vengeance, as such. Just to do something, to die _doing_ something, himself, in his own flesh and his own skin. To … to live, for even half a moment, before death caught up with him again. He wanted … He wanted to live. Just for a moment. That thing inside him, that stubborn, stupid thing. It wanted to live. It still wanted that.

Clarissa would laugh at him so hard right now. She'd smile that fond, bemused smile at him, walk away from him shaking her head in that perpetual amazement she had for his stubbornness. He could almost see it. He could picture her that clearly. She'd ... she'd tell him to try something more sensible than spitting in Deathstorm's face, maybe. Though Clarissa had had a bit of a spiteful streak when pushed as well. All things considered, maybe she would have approved of the impulse. No. Remembering her face at the end, remembering the terror and the horror and the _fury_ , the hate she'd clearly felt for what had been done to him, Martin was certain she would have approved. Nothing excessive. Nothing destructive. She wouldn't have approved of that. But an ... expression of their disdain. That much might be okay.

The decision crystallised inside him. He felt it, felt the ball of it settling hot and hard inside his chest. His limbs tensed. God, did he even remember how to use them? But it hardly mattered. He had all the time in the world right now, until death got around to remembering him again. He could take his time if he wanted to. 

He'd never been a patient man, though. Martin Stein had always been stubborn, hard-headed, and hot-tempered. He'd lost ... He'd lost that too, in the wake of Clarissa's loss. He'd lost it to Raymond, been content to let it be taken, to lie down and fade away and become nothing anymore. But now ... now death had passed him by, at least for this moment. There was no one in his head, no one in his body but him. He'd never had any patience. Not for anyone else, and mostly definitely not for himself. This was not the time to be flopping around like a landed fish.

With that in mind, he forced himself, slowly and painfully, onto hands and knees. Things creaked, things trembled, things lurched and ached and threatened convulsion, more things than he'd remembered bodies even had, but the thing obeyed him. For the first time in ... in too long to think about, his body _obeyed_ him. Grudgingly, more or less, but it did.

Triumph shot through him. Rather pathetically, really, but after all he'd been through Martin was going to take what he could get. His arms shook under his weight. His knees cried out. But he was up, he was moving, he was doing something again. That was a fierce and virulent sort of a triumph for him.

Hands and knees to standing was a trickier proposition. More of a one than he should be contemplating, probably, but at this point he might as well go all the way. The worst that could happen was that he'd fall over. Possibly die. What was that to be afraid of at this stage? He pushed up onto his knees, his head swimming at the sudden verticality. A couple of breaths, a gathering of whatever shreds of determination he had left, and he brought one foot out in front of him, braced both hands on that knee, and _pushed_. Down with the arms, up with the other leg, propelling himself far too fast and far too dangerously to his feet.

He nearly fell. Staggered, swayed, almost blacked out. For a second, he teetered on the edge of falling. And then, lips twisting in a snarl, he had it. He remembered it. He damn well remembered how to keep standing.

It took him a long few minutes to make his way around to the bodies. Standing was fine, walking a little bit more problematic. He made it, though. He made it across to ... Just the two of them now. Reverb. An evil, ambitious little man. Not quite on par with Zoom, and without the more visceral, personal hatred Raymond had earned from him, but Martin wasn't particularly grieved at his death either. He felt vaguely sorry for Reverb's counterpart, though. The breacher, the boy who'd known Martin's name. It was a silly thing to be moved by, maybe, a useless little detail, but it had woken Martin inside Raymond's head. It had brought him back, woken his focus just that little bit once more. Perhaps that ... perhaps it was part of why he had survived. Perhaps, in a way, that boy had saved him. Just enough. Just for a few moments of freedom. That was reason enough to be sorry for him, wasn't it? Reason enough to hope that somehow, despite Zoom's efforts, that the boy and his friend made it out of this world all right. Reverb, though. Reverb had earned none of that. Reverb was just another empty corpse, and with Deathstorm Martin had seen any number of those.

And speaking of. Speaking of.

It looked so different from the outside. Raymond's body. It looked ... so much smaller. Tiny and useless and dead, without the power of Deathstorm to motivate it. Martin stood over it, swaying gently, and ... and stared. At his prison. At his jailor. What was left of them.

He felt ... He waited for hatred. For anger, for rage, for _anything_. This man had helped murder Clarissa, had held Martin chained and bound inside his body and made him watch while his partner murdered the woman Martin loved. This man had held him prisoner for so many years, forced him to be party to so many horrors. Made love to his wife's murderer with Martin trapped beneath his skin. Slaughtered who knew how many with power bought from Martin's imprisonment. He had ... he had earned hatred a thousand times over. He had earned every scrap of it Martin's battered soul had left to give. He should have called it all. The sight of him should have brought it all raging back.

It didn't. Martin tried to look for it, tried to grab around inside his chest and find the hatred Raymond had so justly deserved. It just ... it wasn't there. He couldn't find it. It was gone.

It wasn't forgiveness he was feeling, he thought. Not that. Never, ever, in a thousand years never that. Instead, it was ... emptiness. Maybe even a sort of pity, strange and distant as the thought of living had been not so long ago. The man was dead. So easily, so simply. One blow, from a greater monster than Raymond had ever hoped to be. Slaughtered in front of his lover, her heart ripped casually to pieces as Martin's had been years ago, and then left sprawled uselessly on a warehouse floor. How easily they had died, in the end. How easy Deathstorm had been to kill. The werewolf had died, just like in the movies. There was ... an emptiness in that. A black and near-humorous futility.

Martin closed his eyes. Tears pricked at them again, that violent exhaustion creeping close once more. What a perfect joke, hmm? Raymond, so easily killed, when he'd wanted to live. And Martin, so impossibly alive, when he'd begged for so long to die. How _perverse_ could a universe be?

Oh, it didn't matter. None of it, not anymore. Here was a dead man lying, and he was a dead man walking. What did it matter. What on earth would be the point of vengeance now?

He knelt down. Slowly, carefully. A battered old body that only just remembered what to do. Go easy on it, old man. It hasn't been used in so very long. He knelt down beside his jailor's head, and reached out to rest his fingers very gently on the man's brow.

"... Goodbye, Raymond," he managed, an empty croak of a thing. "Wherever you are ... I hope that you are judged as you deserve."

And then, silently and gently, he brought his fingers down, and closed his captor's empty eyes.

It took him a long time to move again, after that. The emptiness wrapped back around him, a blind and chilling exhaustion. The sensation of living was vague again, a strange and distant thing. He drifted inside his own head, alone and emptied of the presence that had tormented him for so long. Death might have tapped him on the shoulder just then and he quite possibly would not have noticed at all. It didn't, though. Death had not deigned to remember him just yet.

Morning was dawning by the time he remembered himself once more. He blinked his eyes open again, damp and prickly with half-shed tears, and recognised it distantly. He looked over towards the warehouse doors. A world, he thought. A world out there. A body to crawl towards it. The weather. That's what he'd thought, wasn't it? That he could see what the weather was like before he died. Clarissa'd like that better. Yes. She probably would.

The werewolf was dead. Time now to see the sun.

He paused, though. Before he left. He paused and looked down once more. Looked at the body one last time. And then he reached out, with no very clear thought at all, and closed his hand around the quantum splicer. Lifted it clear, fumbled it into the remains of a pocket.

A useless thing, really. A pointless gesture. It would do him no good without someone to bond with, and after Raymond he wasn't sure if ... if that would ever be something he could bear again. Better to die, maybe. Chances were it would happen soon enough anyway. He wasn't sure why he'd taken the thing. But ... They'd put it on first to prevent themselves from destroying a city. He had, at least. In hindsight Raymond had likely only wanted to preserve himself. Even still. In the beginning, the splicer had been a preservative thing. Not the lock, the chain on the cage it had become later. At the start, it had represented a kind of hope.

If he was going to take anything from Raymond, here at the last and in the face of life's perversity ... he rather thought it should be that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what happens to him from here. Maybe he winds up dead. Maybe he turns his inevitable melt-down into a heroic sacrifice of some kind out of sheer perversity. Maybe he manages to find Earth-2's version of Jax. Maybe somehow Earth-1 Ronnie didn't die but got spat out of the singularity further down Earth-2's timeline and he and this Martin have an incredibly fraught and painful encounter. I have no idea. But I wanted ... to imagine some sort of a potentially hopeful ending for Martin. God _damn_ , Deathstorm really killed me. Um. Sorry.


End file.
